ONE MILLION AMERICANS SORTED BY POLITICAL AFFILIATIONA DATABASE THAT OPENS UP NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR PERSECUTION TO EVERYONEYOU MAY BE INCLUDED IN THIS DATABASE IF YOU OR A FRIEND TWEETED ABOUT THE 2012 U.S. PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

An Anti-Social Sculpture is the deliberate and explicit exploitation of individuals as material for an artistic social experiment. The people who comprise these performances produce new anti-social networks through coercive participation in an artwork designed for a provocative and sensational spectacle. The stage of the performance is delineated inside the mediated space of the Anti-Social Sculpture with individuals becoming participants in a show for spectators who watch from afar via the theater of popular media.

This sociological exhibition involves large quantities of informational bodies in an artistic performance without their authorization. It is the latter transgressive artistic practice that new media provides to the artist. Artworks made by people, who use or are subject to personal media, pushes the notion of spectatorship in art and performance to new frontiers. The artist can play with this power of sorting and arranging huge amounts of personal data and, in doing so, artistically reconfigure social forms. The social realities generated by media platforms that collect people’s personal information can function as a set of utilitarian structures for artistic creation. Today, artists can mold sensitive, ready-made informational material and recontextualize it in new speculative scenarios that comment on contemporary society.

The artificial hells created through these Anti-Social Sculptures are the reenactments of today’s social reality: mass surveillance, obsessive stalking, isolated public debate within a social bubble, profiling individuals as micro-targets, the social-manipulation of public opinion, public disclosure of affinities, and misappropriation and exploitation of personal and private information by companies and authorities.

These anti-social experiments, which take the form of performances and sculptures, are defined within the expanded notions of space, body and audience that prevail today. These experiments use informational entities that flow through a new public space formed by media that bridges online and offline environments.

These sculptures offer viewers a potentially transformative experience through cathartic performances generated by social interactions within an artful arrangement of people. They remind us of the possibilities to construct new social realities by reconfiguring information flow through algorithms. Designing new Social Algorithms is a form of sculptural activity: in this case it shapes structures of people who interact and participate, whether passively or actively, in lively performances or statically unveiling their sociological state.

Ultimately, these sculptural performances of informational power aim to unsettle alienating contemporary social conventions. They seek to raise awareness about problematic situations by engaging randomly-selected crowds in a work of art, thus reaching people who usually are excluded by art discourses and breaking the tedium and passivity of media and art consumption.

[1] The data on the website is not indexed by search engines, keeping private (which was publically available) information protected inside an artistic context, in a way only simulating public exposure.